Saturday, September 27, 2014

You might remember this thing. The palette I use in Photoshop that took me years to figure out. It's Cyan, Magenta and Yellow combinations in 25% increments and this is the best way I could figure out of how to generate all the possible combinations of the inks that the printing process uses to make colours.I've uploaded this as a Photoshop ACO file so you can download it and use it yourself if you want it. But only for 7 days from now. I guess I can always repeat the process in the future if anyone's that interested in it... Link below... https://www.hightail.com/download/UlRUaXREQzdwaFJESjlVag?cid=tx-02002207340200000000&s=19102

This was the double-page spread from Nightworld #1, still in the shops if you're lucky... By the time I'd got to what you see above I'd already spent many hours pasting together 4 seperate pieces of artwork from Paolo Leandri into one piece split into a few layers and alot of channels in one Photoshop Image. I got rid of the spirits for a while using Photoshops "Exorcism" tool so I could just concentrate on the physical elements of the image.

Unticking the "Exorcism" box revealed the spirits again in more detail...

Tweak and reduce opacity a bit... nearly there now.

I restored the line-work in the background, which had been a hold, back to black and we're good to go. This took a while...Check out http://www.nightworldcomic.com/And also, here https://kyle-welch-c8u4.squarespace.com/blog/ where you can scroll down a bit and find an interview with Adam McG, the writer of this haunted tome.

"You're looking at it!" The original art for this was from one of the promo posters DC put out shortly before the Watchmen first started publication... I'd like to colour them all up at some point. They're all great. Artwork by Dave Gibbons, colours by me...

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

The
spark that eventually burned up about 4 years of my life first came
to light in the course of a conversation with Grant Morrison. He was
visiting the studio with some black and white photocopies of the
first issue of Final Crisis for us to all “Ooh” and “Ah!” at.
Grant was talking about the opening and closing scenes of the book,
at least as he'd planned the at the time: he was starting with
Anthro, the first boy and was going to close the book with Kamandi,
the last boy. It didn't work out that way, which is I think a bit of
a shame.

Pre-history
had become something of an obsession with me and I mentioned to Grant
that almost every depiction of the dawn of mankind I found at once
far-fetched and unimaginative. I'd mis-pronounced “Anthro” and
“Afro”, and then jokingly covered up my mistake by saying that
the first boy would've been black anyway, not a white kid running around in
North America. I went on to wonder why there's never been a comic or
a movie that depicted early humanity as black.

I
reserved special annoyance for 2001. The proto-humans in that movie
were just offensive. As was the nudge from the Monolith that started
them towards becoming human. The hominid first use of technology was
to pick up a bone and hit someone over the head with it. This was
the primordial tool that eventually led to the craft that would
transport us into Space and the stars. Technology was a product of
violence. Hands were made to hold weapons and fashion more and
better weapons so that we could better kill each other.

I
disagreed.

So,
Grant listened to me slag off all early human fiction and then
quietly said, “Why don't you do something then? You could do a
comic about that.”

So
I did. It's taken a while and it's changed a lot since I first
started writing and drawing the story. I wrote it and re-wrote it,
started drawing it, only to realise it just wasn't right. So I broke
it down and built it up again, rethought everything, rewrote it again
and again and only when I thought it was good enough as a story did I
start drawing it again.

I'm still changing things, spotting things that are not quite right, redrawing panels, sometimes whole pages get dumped and redone.

But it's nearly ready now. Mind you, I was saying that three months ago and I'm still hammering away at this thing.